Tainted Evidence

by Robert Daley

  "Five cops, yes," the old man said.

  Karen tried to remember what else she knew about the Epps case, but her mind was whirling. There had been briefs written, motions argued. It was all vague to her. Since the day Harbison had taken over she had ignored the case entirely.

  "Before that," she said, "the guy murdered one of his colleagues in the drug business up in the Bronx.” Other details were coming back to her. "Cut his tongue out, wrapped him a rug and set him on fire, as I remember."

  "So it was alleged. The Bronx jury acquitted him only last month."

  "Previously he committed other atrocities in Queens."

  "Evidently the lad has quite a temper."

  "Queens couldn't convict him either."

  "That leaves it up to us, doesn't it."

  "The evidence was overwhelming. Both times McCarthy got him off."

  "Justin McCarthy, yes. Our famous civil rights lawyer. He'll be defending again. He'll be your opponent. I want you to try the case."

  "Sir, it's Norman Harbison's case--"

  The DA's voice got impatient. "Norman's got other things on his mind.”

  Karen fell silent.

  "Justin McCarthy, the pride of the bar," said the DA in a kinder tone. "You're not afraid of him, are you?"

  "No, of course not.” What she was afraid of was being rushed into a courtroom without having had time to prepare.

  She wanted to know what had gone on between the DA and Harbison, but saw that he had no intention of telling her.

  "Justin McCarthy is the biggest lawyer you've come up against so far," the DA said. And then after a pause: "Of course you've beaten some very skilled lawyers, haven't you?”

  She hated the patronizing tone but said nothing. Everyone patronized women around here. She did not have time for resentment. Her mind kept flashing from Harbison to McCarthy to herself. The trial was about to begin. If she took the case--did she have an option?--then the trial was already on top of her. Two weeks. Could she get it delayed? Probably not. She could ask for a continuance, but too many had been accorded already, all demanded by McCarthy. The many continuances had become as much a scandal as the five shot cops.

  She wanted to refuse the assignment, or at least protest it, but once this old man had decided something, no one, to her knowledge, had ever changed his mind. She spoke carefully, choosing each word. "Norman's been preparing the case from the beginning. I can't--I mean I couldn't--” Realizing that she had begun to sputter, she stopped and tried to compose herself. "Two weeks is not enough time for me to prepare for trial--"

  "Mr. Coombs was assisting him. You can have Coombs."

  The old man had stood up. The interview was over. He was walking her to the door.

  "You should have no trouble beating McCarthy on this one," the DA continued. "Probably get lots of ink, be on television every night. I see this as a real opportunity for you."

  Those who resisted the old man's decisions were soon working elsewhere. "An opportunity," said Karen, but her voice was flat. "Yes. Thank you."

  By the time she reached her own office she was in a fury. She had her division to run, there were two cases of her own that she was preparing for trial, cases that presented interesting legal questions and which, being rather short, would not cut into her time with her family. These were the case folders she had been carrying and she dropped them heavily on her desk. They landed with a thump and began to spill off and she had to lunge to grab them. It made her even angrier. She gave several loud sighs, then telephoned Harbison's office which was down the hall from her own. They were long halls--he must be nearly a hundred yards away.

  Harbison would call her right back, his secretary promised, so she began to wait. As she paced she twisted the wedding band on her finger. She knew very well something was wrong between the old man and Harbison. That Harbison was suddenly out of favor was clear. That office politics existed was a given. If her own turf were threatened she would protect it, would have to protect it, but other people's turf was not her business. To get mixed up in an office feud was not in her interest. Most of all she wanted to protect her family life--her time at home. Now she saw herself working till midnight for the next two weeks, and probably throughout the trial as well.

  She loved the law. She loved trial work, and matching her wits against other lawyers, usually men, and usually winning guilty verdicts. There was true evil in the world. She had seen it: the blood spattered walls, the corpses that had been knifed, shot, bludgeoned. Stuff that had made her avert her eyes. She had prosecuted the perpetrators of such outrages. She had talked to them, studied them--human evil, men who nonetheless walked and talked and made flip comments just like everyone else. She had devoted her professional life to putting such persons in jail. Which gave her a good feeling when she had time to consider it. But this Epps business was not her case. To have had it from the beginning was one thing, taking it over now was quite another.

  After fifteen minutes she phoned Harbison again, but he still wouldn't take her call. Angrily she marched down there.

  As she barged in he was standing at his window looking out, so she realized he was wounded, and her mood softened.

  She said: "Can we talk about the case?"

  "No we can't.”

  "It's not my case," she said.

  "It is now."

  "If I'm going to try it--"

  "Oh, you're going to try it all right."

  She stared at him a moment. She saw that he cared nothing about her, that for him she didn't exist, a realization that came as a surprise to her, though why? She wondered again what had gone on between him and the old man.

  "You could always resign," he said.

  Perhaps he wanted her to. Back him up by resigning in protest. But she loved her job, and the money she earned was needed at home. "If I'm going to try the case," she said in a milder voice, "I could use some help."

  "See Coombs."

  "Not Coombs, you. You've been working on it eight months, for God's sake."

  He picked up his phone and spoke into it. "Get me Larry Coombs.”

  Karen tried to think what to say, what to do in the face of such rudeness.

  "Larry," said Harbison into the phone, "I've asked Karen Henning to take over the Lionel Epps case. She wants to get together with you."

  Karen knew Coombs. Each year dozens of law school graduates applied for appointments to the DA's staff. Interviewing them was one of the jobs performed by the senior assistant DAs, Karen among them. It had fallen to her last spring to interview Coombs. She had interviewed him twice and had recommended that he be hired, and he was. He was 26, and from Yale, if she remembered correctly. He was short, wore glasses, and had never tried a case. Also he was black. He wore suits with vests, or at least he did the few times she had seen him. She could picture his reaction to Harbison's strange phone call, his surprise. He would want to know what went wrong, why the last minute switch, but probably would no more dare ask her for answers than she had dared ask the DA.

  Harbison put down the phone. "He'll meet you in your office in ten minutes."

  "Coombs wasn't even on the case in the beginning."

  "If Coombs isn't satisfactory, I suggest you plead the case out."

  "At the beginning you couldn't get anybody at all to work it with you, if I remember correctly."

  "You remember wrong. You remember bullshit!"

  Now I've antagonized him completely thought Karen. How brilliant of me. "Norman, please--"

  "No."

  It made her set her jaw. "What happened between you and the boss?"

  "Whatever happened between me and the boss," said Harbison coldly, "will remain between me and the boss."

  They stared at each other. "You are something," Karen said, putting as much venom as possible into her voice. "You are really something.”

  A few minutes after she reentered her own office Harbison's secretary came in with the Epps case file. There were two expandable envelopes, each of them ove
r four inches thick. She withdrew the contents of the first, and while waiting for Coombs paged through it.

  Half an hour had passed. Diagrams of the crime scene had been spread out.

  Coombs leaned over her desk pointing with a pencil. "The detectives came in here, led by this fat idiot Muldoon--you'll meet him--and boom, boom, boom, three cops are down."

  "All right," said Karen.

  "There are rules for arrests of this kind. Muldoon broke them all.” Coombs glanced up at her. "Five cops shot altogether. It's a miracle they weren't all killed."

  "Did he have a warrant."

  "Muldoon? Of course not."

  Karen nodded.

  Coombs said: "Legally they didn't need one."

  "You know that, I know it, Justin McCarthy knows it," Karen replied. "But the jury won't know it. McCarthy will make a big thing out of it. He'll spend a week on it. Look, let's go up to the scene right now. Do you have time?"

  "Of course," said the young man.

  Of course, thought Karen. Well, what else could he say?

  "The defendant leaps into the cab about here," said Coombs. It was late afternoon and the sun fell in ribbons through the el tracks above. "The cops then fire at the moving vehicle, which is strictly against department regulations. And--"

  "Don't tell me," said Karen. The details were piling up in her head and she did not like any of them.

  "They stopped it--hit the cab driver. Yeah, right in the head.”

  Karen said nothing.

  "After that four of the wounded cops sue the department for damages."

  Karen winced.

  "--Charging negligence, reckless planning, and I don't know what all else. The cab driver's wife has a suit going, too. It's a beautiful case, alright."

  Karen gave a wry laugh. "Yes, a real opportunity for me."

  Above her head a train went by. The stanchions seemed to shiver in the light, the sidewalk to tremble under her feet. She peered down the avenue. Three blocks south was the 125th St. station. Each morning, twenty minutes into her commute between the suburbs and work, her train stopped there for a few seconds. Each night on the way home, the same. Sometimes she looked up from whatever case she was poring over and gazed out at what she could see of Harlem.

  Tonight she would board her train there. Her ride home would be ten minutes shorter. And she was starting home right now, she decided. She had had all she could take for one day. She would not go back to the office first. And although this decision was accompanied by a twinge of guilt, for she would be cheating the city out of a few minutes of her time, she made it right by promising to study the Epps case folders all the way home.

  But she was a white woman in Harlem with gutted hulks of buildings to either side of the street, and she knew about violence first hand.

  "Will you walk me to the station?" she asked Coombs.

  The young man's reaction was immediate. "Are you afraid some black guy will assault you between here and there?" he snapped. "Is that it?"

  So she realized that her fear of Harlem--it wasn't really fear--had insulted him, and she thought: if he's that tender I don't want him on the case. I can't cope with him too. But he alone knew this case, apart from Harbison, who had no intention of helping. She needed Coombs, and so tried to make amends.

  "I'm a woman, Larry.” She gave him a smile. "I don't like to walk alone anywhere in this city."

  His face had gone blank and she looked into it for a moment. Then he nodded and said: "My response was uncalled for. I'm sorry."

  She put her hand on his shoulder. "We don't know each other yet."

  And so Coombs walked her to the station. He even waited beside her until the train came into the platform. As it pulled out she waved to him from the window as she would have waved to her husband if she were starting a long trip.

  New Rochelle to the northeast is another suburb close to New York. It is a serious city in its own right, 70,000 people, with, therefore, more diversity than most suburbs. The downtown is not chic and there are neighborhoods where crime and violence are commonplace, where unemployed black men stand around on street corners same as Harlem. But there are country clubs and sprawling golf courses as well, and fronting on Long Island Sound are houses that could only be called mansions. But for the most part New Rochelle is a middle class city, and a white city. Nice houses but close together. Tree lined streets. Bronxville abuts it to the west.

  In New Rochelle there is also a small, Catholic, liberal arts college of modest academic reputation, and this was where Henry Henning, Karen's husband, was a professor of political science. As her train pulled out of the l25th St. station he was walking along one of the campus' well tended paths toward his last class of the afternoon. He wore charcoal slacks and a tweed jacket, and carried a briefcase in one hand and several books in the other.

  Students greeted him as they passed, but he was concentrating on the class he was about to give and so his responses were distracted.

  "Afternoon," he said repeatedly. "G'afternoon."

  A student ran up from behind, slowing down to walk alongside.

  "Professor Henning?”

  Henning recognized him. "Hello, Billy."

  "Can I ask you about tomorrow's test?"

  Henning frowned. "Why don't we wait and talk about it in class."

  Together they entered the building, and then a particular classroom. Henning, as he stepped up onto the dais, saw that the seats were about half full. The students, boys and girls, were all about l8. He started by taking attendance, something the better institutions did not require, hadn't in years. It was the rule here though, as if to prove that in this place, if you didn't take attendance the students wouldn't come.

  Attendance out of the way, Henning spoke about tomorrow's examination.

  "There will be no obscure questions," he promised. He moved back and forth on the dais as he spoke. There were techniques for keeping the attention of teenagers, and he knew and exploited most of them. "The purpose is not to trick you. It's to make you consider one more time all we have been talking about these last two months.” He looked out over the room. "And what is it that we've talked about so much?” He pointed to a girl student.

  "Political leadership in the real world," she told him.

  "Right. Especially a concept that may be new to some of you. Sometimes political leadership means hanging back. What about General Washington?"

  Henning pointed to a second student.

  "He hung back," the student said.

  "Meaning?"

  "He avoided a major battle because he feared that if he lost it, the revolutionary movement would collapse."

  Henning liked kids, liked being revered by them, but the level of scholarship in this place was dismal. "For most of seven years Washington hung back," Henning said. "What about Lincoln?"

  "He couldn't free the slaves immediately," a girl student told him.

  He kept pointing his finger around the room eliciting answers.

  "It would have made the border states secede," a boy student piped up. "And he couldn't win the civil war without them."

  Everything had to be simplified for the students here or they wouldn't get it, much less remember it. He longed to go beneath the surface, to make them grapple with major ideas, but couldn't.

  "Roosevelt?" said Henning. They did less well with this one, so he explained it again. Roosevelt had had to find a way to keep England afloat until his own isolationist country got in the mood for war.

  "What about Lyndon Johnson?” Henning looked for a raised hand and didn't get one. "Billy?" he said.

  The boy wasn't sure of himself. "He didn't hang back," he offered.

  "Right."

  "He lost this country first, and the Vietnam War only after," the kid said.

  It's the best I can hope for here, Hemming told himself--that they learn to parrot some things back. He would never be able to make them understand what Vietnam once meant to the country. Vietnam had been, still was, Henning'
s war. He had joined the protest marches, ceremoniously burned his draft card, considered conscientious objection or fleeing to Canada. Fortunately he was in college and never called. Many years had now passed, but he was still a militant liberal. His wife's views unfortunately, were different. She actually liked putting people in jail. He imagined she had been tainted by contact with cops. To Henning cops were right wingers, rednecks, fascists.

  "Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Johnson," he said, "tomorrow's test will be about them. Guys with major problems. Guys not very different from you and me. Guessing. Hoping. Trying to work it out.” It pleased Henning that the class had come with him this far at least.

  "This is a political science course," Henning told his students. "But politics is not a science. It's an instinct, almost an art.” He was talking only to himself, he supposed. "So is the politics in your own lives," he continued, "the politics of getting along with each other. Of giving something in order to get something.” And with these remarks he left tomorrow's test for tomorrow, and launched into the material he had prepared.

  His wife about then got off the train in Bronxville, got on the bus and rode home. She came in the door and called out, but got back no answer. Her mood was still what it had been an hour ago: frustration, anger, self pity. Though the Epps case was not her job she was stuck with it. She had to tell someone, but the house was empty. She went into the kitchen and as she began dinner she waited impatiently for her husband to get home.

  When the class ended Henning went back to the faculty lounge to check his mail one last time--in the box now lay a single letter. When he saw where it was from he took it into the men's room and opened it there. As he read it a big grin came onto his face and when he had finished reading he kissed it.

  He left for home a few minutes later, stopping at the supermarket to buy $88 worth of groceries, because shopping was one of his jobs this week. When he came into the kitchen carrying bags, his wife was at the stove and Jackie was rummaging through the refrigerator. He put the bags down, gave Karen a kiss on the cheek, then turned to tousle the boy's hair.